Image stitching and illumination correction for metallic multi-purpose canister visual inspection data

Visual inspection is an important activity common in the assessment of various assets in the nuclear industry. Visual inspection has applications ranging from determining the health of the nuclear reactor core itself [1, 2], determining the health of vital components of the nuclear power plant such as superheaters [3], assessing the conditions of welds in thick-walled pressure vessels common to Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) and Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) [4] and many other applications. Each of these activities typically involves gathering a large amount of raw data either in the form of video or still images. At any given instance of this data it is only possible to resolve localised information therefore suitable processing is required to generate a global view of the asset.